Redemption Street (11 page)

“You know that stupid groundhog they have in Pennsylvania every year?” Molly slurred.

“Sure.”

“Well, Dick came up with Beaver Day. Beaver’s the state animal, you know?”

“No,” I confessed. “In Brooklyn you sorta grow up assuming pigeons are the state animal.”

“Anyhows, Dick is always the guy who yanks Old Rotterdam Rodney the beaver out of his hutch or den or whatever beavers live in, and shows him his shadow. It drew a lot of coverage for a few years, but just lately only the
Catskill Trib
and the local radio station send reporters.”

“But Hammerling shows up nonetheless, huh?”

“Yessiree. Hey, Moe, how do you know if a beaver sees his shadow?”

“How?”

“You ask him!”

Molly thought this hysterically funny and laughed so hard she began choking. Sam Gutterman she wasn’t. When Molly got done catching her breath and drying her eyes, she continued detailing Hammerling’s career. Not only was he a publicity whore, but apparently he was power-hungry as well, always trying to wrangle the chairmanship on as many committees as he could get appointed to.

“I think he wants to be governor someday,” Molly opined. “He does a bad job of hiding that.”

He had a lot of other egomaniacs on line ahead of him. When I expressed a version of this sentiment to Molly she disagreed.

“I guess Dick’s got his faults like everyone else, but his trying to reopen the Fir Grove business ain’t winning him too many friends in these parts.”

“It’s gotten him a lot of press, hasn’t it?”

“Maybe so,” she granted, “but it cuts against the grain around here. The fire’s the worst thing ever happened in this town. The whole place went to hell in a handbasket after that. People don’t like it being dragged up again. It’s a part of the past I think we’d all prefer stay buried.”

As she had earlier, Molly started off on a tangent. This time I was treated to the details of Richard Hammerling’s other foibles. Unfortunately, none of this stuff was either pertinent or particularly interesting. I passed the time watching a bald-headed guy playing darts in the corner. I think maybe his hairline reminded me of the strange guy I’d seen pass by the front window of the hardware store earlier in the day. In any case, I decided to interrupt Molly’s version of the life and times of Richard Hammerling before I began to twitch.

“Molly, let me ask you ask you a strange question.”

“How strange?”

I described the man in the threadbare coat and waited for Molly to delve into the vast minutiae of his life, including his birth weight. However, for the first time all evening, Molly was speechless. She excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. When she got back, she went to the bar to buy a pack of smokes. Then she bummed a few bucks off me and took the better part of a fortnight selecting tunes on the box that had already been played five times. Clearly, Molly was as anxious to discuss this subject as she was to undergo a full course of chemotherapy.

“Okay, Molly,” I said, “you’re stalling. I was only a little curious before. Now one of us ain’t gettin’ outta here alive unless I find out about that guy at the hardware store.”

She actually looked frightened. I remembered about sarcasm not being a universal language and apologized. Not effusively, mind you. I wanted to know.

“You’re not gonna get insulted or anything, are you?” She really was nervous.

“I promise.”

“I don’t know the man you described personally, but I think he belongs to a … to a … I guess you’d call it a cult. We call ‘em the Yellow Stars. They’re up in the same neck of the woods as Robby—I mean, Anton Harder’s people. They keep to themselves mostly. Hardly ever come into town.”

“The Yellow Stars?”

“They wear a big yellow patch on their coats that has the word—”

“J-U-D-E-N,” I spelled out loud.

“That’s it,” Molly said. “It means—”

“Jew.”

“You said you weren’t gonna get insulted or anything. I remember how touchy you got the other day when this sorta thing came up.”

“It’s okay, Molly. I’m not insulted or anything.”

“Not even a little?”

“Not even a little, but I am still pretty damned curious.”

Molly told me what she knew, which wasn’t very much. The Yellow Stars owned what used to be Koppelman’s Bungalow Colony, about five miles north of the Fir Grove. They kept to themselves and rarely came into town. When they did, it was to see the doctor, usually, or to file papers with the town. They didn’t sell roses or anything one had come to expect from a “cult.” She was unsure of their agenda, or if they even had an agenda at all.

“The other Jews,” she said, “the Hasids, they hate ‘em.”

Suddenly, I was less interested and pretty fucking angry. Having grown up with several children of concentration-camp survivors, I found the notion of people playing at this sort of thing repulsive. The whole victimization thing made me want to puke. Didn’t they know, everyone was a victim?

Oh God! Molly had played “Piano Man” again. It was no longer nine o’clock and it was getting perilously close to being Sunday. Time to go, but I feared making a graceful exit wasn’t going to be easy. Molly had grown a little touchy-feely. There had been a time not too many years ago when I would have gone home with her. She was likable enough, cute in her way, and she sure liked me, but even before I met Katy I’d given up on one-night stands. The sex, good or bad, was never at issue. No one should ever mistake me for a knight of the Round Table. It was just that the lack of intimacy had begun to suck the life out of me.

“I gotta go, Molly.”

She took my hand in a death grip. I admired people who didn’t give up without a fight; however, I preferred admiring them from outside the ring. I took the offensive, knelt forward, and kissed Molly long, but softly on the cheek. Pulling away, I brushed my hand across her cheek and mouthed the words “Thank you.” She let go of my hand. The battle was won. No one seemed scarred for life. Then why did I feel like such a shit?

Fresh air had never smelled so sweet as it did when I stepped out of Hanrahan’s. Another hour in there and I’d be coughing up a lung. As it was, I considered burning my clothes instead of having them cleaned. It’s almost impossible to fully get out the smell of smoke. Apparently, the smoke from the old Fir Grove fire still hung over Old Rotterdam like a permanent cloud. I thought I could almost smell it myself. The vision of Andrea’s charred body popped back into my head.

The street was awfully quiet. That’s the thing about the city: it’s never quiet, not like this. The quiet made me uncomfortable. A lot about this place made me uncomfortable.

Chapter Seven
November 29th

I woke up missing Katy and Sarah. My evening with Molly had been a painful reminder of where my life had been headed before Patrick M. Maloney fell off the face of the earth. Most of the time, I could hold down the panic associated with the thought of my father-in-law’s ratting me out. This was not one of those times. Panic was all around me. I had come close to confessing to Katy on several occasions, but the words weren’t in me, nor was the courage to speak them if they had been.

I got out of my room as fast as I could. Bad food was apparently a remedy for panic. The coffee alone was enough to put a man back on the straight and narrow. And once I bit into my bagel with lox and cream cheese, the only thing I was panicked by was the onset of food poisoning. Admittedly, I was never much of a lox eater, but this stuff was rancid. The old folks around me didn’t seem to mind too much.

When I spotted Mr. Roth, again splendidly dressed, entering the dining hall, I waved for him to come sit with me. He was only too pleased to join me as long as I was still willing to share a drink with him later in the day. I told him I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I see you’re not enjoying your lox,” he observed after placing his order for bran cereal and a banana. “Terrible stuff. I wouldn’t feed it to a pig.”

“Nice sentiment.”

We had a laugh over that. I asked Mr. Roth where he came from.

“Boca Raton via Brooklyn via Auschwitz,” he said, rolling up his sleeve to reveal a five-digit tattoo on his forearm. “And my name is Izzy, so you don’t have to call me Mr. Roth, Mr. Prager.”

“That’s Moe, or Moses, Mr. Roth.”

“
Oy gevalt
, they had less trouble figuring out the shape of the negotiating table for the Vietnam War, for Chrissakes! Call me whatever you want.”

“You, too, Mr. Roth.”

When his cereal came, I let him get some of it down before starting the conversation again. I asked him why he bothered coming to a place like the Swan Song if he knew it was a dump. He gestured at the other people in the room.

“Most of us live in the same retirement community. We have very little family left, the majority of us. So we get a big discount and come up to the mountains twice a year. We come at Thanksgiving, and in the summer for a week. Fewer of us come each year, but the mountains are a place we all have such happy memories of. Mister, I could tell you stories….”

I smiled. “I hope you will.”

“Later.” He waved. “Later.”

“Why the Swan Song?” I asked.

“They give the biggest discount, and we remember Sam from the old times. He was pretty famous almost, once. Would you believe it? I don’t know. Where else would we go? Old people don’t like change much. We haven’t got the time to deal with it, so we put up with the bad coffee and the mystery lox and we remember sunnier days. Hold on to those days tightly, Mr. Moe, like an eagle holds its prey.” Mr. Roth’s lips turned down at the corners.

I changed the subject. “So what did you do for a living?”

“I owned a fine men’s-clothing store on Flatbush Avenue for thirty years. House of Roth, you ever hear of it? The Dodgers used to shop there all the time. I got pictures. Let me tell you, I got pictures. Me fitting Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese, the Duke. But I liked the colored players the best: Jackie Robinson, and Junior Gilliam, and the crippled one, the catcher—”

“Campanella.”

“That’s him, Campy. Such a pity, a man like that. But the colored players, we understood each other,” he said. “We understood what it was to struggle. We appreciated the little things.”

I didn’t doubt it. I excused myself. I found I really needed to hear Katy’s voice.

“Later?” he almost pleaded.

“Later.”

This time I got her at home. The wonderful thing about it was that she sounded even happier, even more relieved to hear from me than I was to hear the sound of her voice. Mr. Roth’s words about appreciating the little things rang in my ears. She filled me in on what I had missed at my in-laws’. Nothing. It had been a quiet stay. Her father had mentioned taking a trip down to Coney Island in the spring to spend a day with Sarah on the rides. Those words rang in my head, too, but flat and out of tune.

Katy, Miriam, and Cindy had gotten drunk together and spent the better part of the evening sharing bad blind-date stories. I thought about asking for more details and quickly changed my mind. I could have dealt with some of Katy’s stories, but I didn’t want to think about my little sister or my three-times-a-mother sister-in-law out on dates. Call me old-fashioned. Katy and Sarah had spent the night at Aaron and Cindy’s. Sarah was still there being fawned over by her big cousins.

“It’s good to get some time alone,” Katy admitted, “but I’d rather spend it alone with you.”

We got around to talking about the case. When I tried to explain, I realized the only tangible thing I had was a cracked windshield and a new paint job on the hood of my car. I carefully omitted those details. There was no need to worry Katy. What I did tell her was that I had a hunch, but, I cautioned, every broken-down horse-player I ever met had a hunch. Some had sure things. The only sure thing was that most hunches don’t pan out.

“You had a hunch about me,” she said.

“I said most hunches don’t pan out, not all.”

“Good thing for you some do.”

Feeling better for having spoken to Katy, and with nothing on my plate until later, I decided to go and do some souvenir shopping, or maybe even take a ride up to the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown.

Mr. Roth’s room wasn’t so different from mine. His TV worked a little better. Instead of snow on the screen there were wavy negative images. Everything looked like the special effects from
The Outer Limits
. “We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical….”

“In Boca, we got cable. Perfect reception all the time. Too bad there’s only
dreck
to watch, but it’s crystal-clear
dreck
! Sometimes I watch the soap operas, with their crazy plots, in the afternoons. I think more people get amnesia than the common cold on those things. And resurrection! They bring more people back from the dead than Jesus Christ. You got cable in Brooklyn yet?”

“The politicians haven’t been sufficiently paid off,” I said. “We’ll get it just in time for them to invent something new, and then my grandchildren will wait for that.”

He clicked off the set. “Vodka or scotch?”

“Scotch.” He disappeared into the bathroom and quickly emerged with two hotel glasses in hand. He said something in a Slavic tongue I didn’t recognize, clinked my glass, and made his vodka vanish in one swallow. He didn’t make a show of it: no grunting or throat clearing, no head shaking, no “Oh, that’s good.” I liked that about the man. There’s something refreshing about a lack of pretense. Maybe that comes with age.

“Another?” he asked.

“Not just now, thanks, but you go ahead.”

He made another trip into the bathroom and came out carrying both the scotch and vodka bottles.

“Too much exercise,” he said. “I already make too many trips to the bathroom.”

He helped himself to half a glassful and sat down on the edge of the bed, sipping his vodka this time. I took the desk chair over by the window.

“So you’re a cop,” he said matter-of-factly.

This was getting ridiculous. Too bad I didn’t have my old uniform with me. It would save people the trouble of guessing.